Participants in the Framingham Heart Study who achieved higher levels of education tended to age more slowly and lived longer lives compared to those who did not achieve upward educational mobility, according to a new study from the Mailman School of Public Health in Columbia University and The Robert N. Butler Columbia Senior Center. Upward educational mobility was significantly associated with a slower rate of aging and a lower risk of death. The results are published online at JAMA Network open.
The Framingham Heart Study is an ongoing observational study that first began in 1948 and currently spans three generations.
Columbia’s analysis is the first to relate educational mobility to the pace of biological aging and mortality. “We have known for a long time that people who have higher levels of education tend to live longer lives. But there are many challenges in figuring out how that happens and, crucially, whether interventions to promote educational attainment will contribute to healthy lives. longevity,” said Daniel Belsky, PhD, associate professor of Epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School and the Aging Center and senior author of the paper.
To measure the pace of aging, the researchers applied an algorithm known as the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock to genomic data collected by the Framingham Heart Study. The latest findings showed that, as measured by the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock, two years of additional schooling translated into a two to three percent slower rate of aging. This slowing in the rate of aging corresponds to an approximately 10 percent reduction in the risk of mortality in the Framingham Heart Study, according to Belsky’s previous research on the association of DunedinPACE with the risk of death.
DunedinPACE was developed by Columbia researchers and colleagues and reported in January 2022. Based on an analysis of chemical tags in the DNA contained in white blood cells, or DNA methylation marks, DunedinPACE is named after the birth cohort of the Dunedin studio used to develop it. DunedinPACE (Pace of Aging Computed from the Epigenome) is measured from a blood test and works as a speedometer for the aging process, measuring how fast or slow a person’s body changes as they age.
Biological aging refers to the accumulation of molecular changes that progressively undermine the integrity and resilience of our cells, tissues and organs as we age.
The Columbia researchers used data from 14,106 Framingham heart studies spanning three generations to link children’s educational achievement data with that of their parents. They then used data from a subset of participants who provided blood samples during data collection to calculate the pace of biological aging using the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock. In the primary analysis, the researchers tested associations between educational mobility, aging, and mortality in a subset of 3,101 participants for whom measures of educational mobility and pace of aging could be calculated.
For 2,437 participants with a sibling, the researchers also tested whether differences in educational level between siblings were associated with a difference in the rate of aging.
“A key error in studies like these is that people with different levels of education tend to come from families with different educational backgrounds and different levels of other resources,” explained Gloria Graf, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Epidemiology supervised by Belsky. and first author of the study. “To address these confounds, we focus on educational mobility, how much more (or less) education a person completed relative to their parents, and sibling differences in educational attainment: how much more (or less) education a person completed relative to their parents. relationship with their parents. siblings. These study designs control for differences between families and allow us to isolate the effects of education.”
By combining these study designs with the new DunedinPACE epigenetic clock, the researchers were able to test how education affects the pace of aging. Then, by linking the education and pace of aging data with longitudinal records of how long the participants lived, the team was able to determine whether a slower pace of aging explained greater longevity in people with more education.
“Our findings support the hypothesis that interventions to promote educational attainment will slow the pace of biological aging and promote longevity,” Graf said. “Ultimately, experimental evidence is needed to confirm our findings,” Belsky added. “Epigenetic clocks like DunedinPace have the potential to improve these experimental studies by providing an outcome that may reflect the impacts of education on healthy aging long before the onset of diseases and disabilities in old age.”
“We found that upward educational mobility was associated with a slower rate of aging and a lower risk of death,” Graf said. “In fact, up to half of the educational gradient in mortality we observed is explained by healthier aging trajectories among better-educated participants.” This pattern of association was similar between generations and was maintained within comparisons between siblings in the family: siblings with greater educational mobility tended to have a slower rate of aging compared to their siblings with less education.
Co-authors are Calen Ryan, Meeraj Kothari and Alison Aiello of the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and Butler Columbia Aging Center; Peter Muennig, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health; Terrie Moffitt, Avshalom Caspi, and Karen Sugden, Duke University; and Hexuan Liu, University of Cincinnati.
The study was supported by National Institutes of Health grants R01AG073402, R01AG073207, and R21AG078627.